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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature

Moretti, Franco

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoverty & Social Work

ISBN10: 1781683042
ISBN13: 9781781683040
Publisher: Verso
Published: Aug 5 2014
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.65
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.10
Language: English
The bourgeois ... Not so long ago, this notion seemed indispensable to social analysis; these days, one might go years without hearing it mentioned. Capitalism is more powerful than ever, but its human embodiment seems to have vanished. 'I am a member of the bourgeois class, feel myself to be such, and have been brought up on its opinions and ideals, ' wrote Max Weber, in 1895. Who could repeat these words today? Bourgeois 'opinions and ideals'--what are they?

Thus begins Franco Moretti's study of the bourgeois in modern European literature--a major new analysis of the once-dominant culture and its literary decline and fall. Moretti's gallery of individual portraits is entwined with the analysis of specific keywords--useful and earnest, efficiency, influence, comfort, roba--and of the formal mutations of the medium of prose. From the working master of the opening chapter, through the seriousness of nineteenth-century novels, the conservative hegemony of Victorian Britain, the national malformations of the Southern and Eastern periphery, and the radical self-critique of Ibsen's twelve-play cycle, the book charts the vicissitudes of bourgeois culture, exploring the causes for its historical weakness, and for its current irrelevance.

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